


the secret lives of con men

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2013 [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), White Collar
Genre: Community: wishlist_fic, F/M, Prompt Fic, mentions of child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 04:00:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1065506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter tries to understand Neal's quirks. He fails.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the secret lives of con men

**Author's Note:**

> **prompt** : Cadalie asked for _White Collar/Once Upon a Time, Baelfire, Neal Caffrey, Baelfire grew up into a different Neal_  
>  I did my best. Concrit appreciated.

+

Neal is… a little weird.

Even for a self-proclaimed gentleman thief ex-con on a leash, he’s weird and it starts long before the rat pack suits and the damn hats.

Peter keeps a list of all of Neal’s little quirks, hoping they will one day add up to something that makes sense. So far, nothing does.

Like this: Sometimes, Neal steals things that don’t fit his pattern. Not multi-million dollar pieces of art, but smaller things by unknown artists. Rare books, first editions of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. A Japanese figurine of a water god. An unknown sculpture called “Witchwars”. 

At first, Peter thinks that it’s not even Neal stealing those things but someone copying his style, trying to ride his coattails through the criminal grapevine. 

It’s not. 

Neal steals Monets, Degas’, Picassos and Klimts and the next day, a tattered copy of some eighteenth century poetry collection, not even a first edition. 

Weird.

Accounts of Neal telling fairytales to a bunch of children on a train to Portland cross his desk, a rumor of how the cleverest thief in the world almost got killed for a supposedly magical artifact of no monetary value at all.

Weirder. 

But, okay, it’s an obsession, a little hobby. Even international super thieves need one of those and hey, maybe the kid had a rough childhood.

That’s the other thing though. A childhood. A past.

Neal has neither of those things. 

It’s not just that his face floats around the system without a record or a name attached, it’s that he does. not. exist. 

Peter has compared his finger prints, his DNA, his dental records. He has run Neal’s picture through every single database there is, has had experts mock up a teenaged version of him, a ten-year-old version. Neal has never been a missing child, has never been to school, has never been to a doctor. 

His passport is forged, his ID is forged, his diplomas are forged. His damn library card is forged.

Sometimes, people slip through the cracks, ghosts that never enter a machine, phantoms in the modern world. It happens. But every time Peter asks post-jail Neal about it, he gets a crooked grin in response, a little twisted, a little broken.

He goes back and spends weeks combing through files on street kids, rent boys, small time pick pockets. 

Nothing.

He outright asks Neal where he comes from, practically begs him to just give Peter a damn state. Hell, at this point a general region would be enough. Anything.

Neal shrugs and leans his head against the passenger side window, eyes closed. “My father was a coward and my mother ran away with a pirate.” 

His smile is small and inscrutable and Peter can’t tell if he’s lying or not. Story of his life. 

+

Sometimes, Neal hums lullabies under his breath.

+

Neal has scars.

Some of them are plainly the result of living dangerously, but there are some that are older. 

Peter has seen child abuse before, lash marks, belt buckles, cigarette burns. Neal’s scars aren’t like that. He has small white lines and spots up to his elbows, as if from hard work. His knees are a hatch work of white and whiter, his back looks similar.

Peter tries and tries and cannot figure out what caused them.

He asks about them once, just once. Neal shrugs and says, “Not all of us were born with a silver spoon in our mouths.”

+

Some days, he has an accent, too.

Usually when the weather is bad and it’s been raining for days, or when he’s drunk and his tongue gets too heavy to keep up whatever accent he’s chosen to fake this week. 

The real accent, the one that peeks through in those moments, is something jagged and… not heavy, exactly. Just weighted very differently from English. Peter listens to hours of example accents and the ones that come closest are Skandinavian nad Germanic languages. Still not a match though.

He’d ask about that, too, but at this point, he’s learned that all a question will get him is a glib lie and the certainty that Neal will never slip up in this way again. 

So he listens to the not-quite-rough cadence of Neal muttering under his breath after a bad case and too much wine and tries not to read too much heartache into it.  
+

He tries another approach. 

The one thing he knows Neal will risk his life and safety for, besides Kate: fairytales.

He drops references in conversations, makes little jokes, is generally very subtle about it, if he does say so. Neal smiles sometimes, before he can check himself, that knowing, twisted curl of the lip that Peter is so familiar and frustrated with. 

One day, at lunch, they end up talking about all the things El has to put up with and Neal argues that Peter should appreciate her more. Of course the kid doesn’t have the first clue about solidarity between men.

Peter shrugs, shakes his head. “I appreciate her. She knows I do.”

“Sometimes knowing isn’t enough. Sometimes you need to show it.”

“What do you want me to do? Slay a dragon for my one true love?” Peter snaps, a bit too hard around the edges.

Neal freezes. It takes just a second, there and gone again, but Neal freezes.

“What?”

“True love,” the younger man mutters, blue eyes distant.

“I know you believe in it,” Peter points out, reasonably, their little fight forgotten.

“Of course I do, Peter.” His expression is sad.

“Kate?” he asks with as much compassion as he can muster for a woman better off dead, or at least far, far away from Neal.

A headshake. “No. There was a girl,” Neal offers, freely and without prompting, like he’s been needing to tell the story for a long time. Peter knows enough to let him be. “We were just dumb kids, picking pockets – allegedly – but she was… brilliant. Perfect.”

“What happened?” He can guess.

“I messed up. Made a mistake on the pick-up. She took the fall for me. And by the time she got out, I’d gotten into trouble with the wrong people. I was trying to make too much money too fast and it drew the wrong kind of attention.”

“What’d you need the money for?” because if Peter knows anything about Neal, is that he’s not stupid. Usually.

“To make her safe. To protect her from-“ he bites his lip, hard and falls silent. “I couldn’t go back for her. It was too dangerous, with the way things were, after. Never mind.”

He shakes it off. As suddenly as the conversation started, he shakes it off, moves on, starts babbling about baubles Peter could never afford to buy El and all the reasons he should just let Neal steal them. It’s a con, a trick, a lie, a deflection, just like the suits and the hats and the grin, but just this once, Peter lets him.

+

It doesn’t really make sense, the way Neal says, “the way things were with her”, not until Peter actually meets her, almost a year later.

It’s a Friday and he and Neal are out and about, chasing down leads and suddenly Neal stops. Just stops. 

There is a woman at the end of the block, tall, blonde. Her eyes are bright, her brows furrowed. Her jaw is set tightly and the sun catches on her bright red leather jacket. She looks, at first sight, dangerous, and at second, lost. 

Her hands are empty, resting on the shoulders of a little boy, standing in front of her. His hair is a dirty brown, his eyes bright blue. His grin is familiar to the point of taking Peter’s breath away and Neal still doesn’t move, doesn’t even breathe. 

The woman gives the boy, who’s leaning into her stomach with comfortable familiarity, a nudge forward and they come closer, closer, closer.

“Neal,” the woman finally says and she sounds… fond, angry, resigned. 

Neal finally moves. “Emma,” he returns, reaches out a hand, drops it. “I… is this…”

He knew then, all along. He knew, and that’s why he ran from his true love, the woman with the green eyes. He knew she was pregnant and so he abandoned her to keep her safe. 

Oh, Neal. Always the fool for love, the noble knight. Always losing.

Emma opens her mouth to answer, but the boy is faster, taking another step forward, away from his mother, and blurting, “I’m Henry. Hi, Dad!”

And then he’s hugging Neal around the middle, all trust and love and joy and Neal’s hands rise automatically to encircle the boy’s shoulders. He squeezes his eyes tightly shut and holds on. 

Less than a foot away, Emma blinks back tears and smiles.

Finally, Neal speaks. “Hey, Henry,” he tries, finds his voice, leans down. “I have so many things to tell you.”

Henry leans back to beam at… at his father. “Fairytales, right?”

With a gasp, Emma tries to pull Henry away. “Kid,” she says, tone warning. But Neal snags her hand, pulls it closer. 

“Yeah,” he mutters, staring her straight in the face. “Fairytales.”

And Peter hasn’t got the faintest what that means, but Emma relaxes and Henry laughs and Neal, for once, loses all the fakeness and just _is_.

+

The next morning, one Neal Caffrey disappears without a trace.

Peter looks for him, of course, but never too hard. 

+

+


End file.
